Project Showcase

In our first real foray in to programing with machine learning we left a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to ‘meditate’ on an image of Saraswati, Goddess of knowledge, music, arts, and learning. Once trained in this fashion you can feed the CNN with other images, and it will ‘paint’ them in the style of the image it has learnt, using a process known as Neural Style Transfer. The source images are photos we have taken whilst living in Bhutan, a Buddhist kingdom on the Himalayas’ eastern edge.

We’ve also done some pretty cool R&D into using the same methods with realtime video.

From February 7 through March 17, 2018, Pilevneli Gallery presented Refik Anadol’s latest project on the materiality of remembering. Melting Memories offered new insights into the representational possibilities emerging from the intersection of advanced technology and contemporary art. By showcasing several interdisciplinary projects that translate the elusive process of memory retrieval into data collections, the exhibition immersed visitors in Anadol’s creative vision of “recollection.”

We wrote custom software transposing EEG data in to procedural noise forms- a really engaging challenge, both technically and conceptually.

Data consists of valuable information that enhances people’s lives and it has so many stories to tell. Refik Anadol was commissioned by Europe’s largest engineering company, Siemens, to create a data-driven public art installation.

You can see some great examples of data sculpture in his other works, and we were very happy to help in this delivery. Our brief: create specialist software to enable large amounts of actual mobility data to be translated into a stunning, tangible piece of art that we can all enjoy.

We really enjoyed to collaborate with his studio and delivered a result that was very well received by both client and audiences.

Instance Noodles is our publicly released free vvvv library to quickly prototype visual applications that run on the ferocious power of modern graphics cards. It enables a hyper fast visual workflow for what’s known as GPGPU programming as well as modules that create and manipulate 3D geometry. In a nutshell GPGPU allows us to use the graphics card beyond it’s traditional role of drawing things to compute quite a few general algorithmic feats, and accomplish data wrangling that in many cases is orders of magnitude faster then traditional CPU based programming, particularly when dealing with massive arrays.

Who uses it?

After starting out as a research project, we now use it ourselves for most projects in-house (see most recently The Art Of Intelligence). It’s also been spotted in the wild being used by a pretty cool range of realtime graphics practitioners all over the world. Here’s some of our favorite to date:

Art Aquarium is an interactive experience to help inspire and educate children about the importance of sustainable seas.

Through creativity and technology, guests at SEA LIFE Sydney & Melbourne Aquariums have the opportunity to draw their own undersea creature and add their unique artwork to a digital underwater world filled with colorful and vibrant aquatic animals.